Category Lotus Media
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I have been working on a general catch-up post, but I caught wind of this news story and just had to comment.

In a piece entitled, "Politicos squabble over 'missing' White House e-mails" over at CNet's news divsion, it tells a story about how there are over 5 million emails missing from email servers used by the President's office. These emails seem to have gone missing due to a couple of problems with the migration of the White House email infrastructure from Lotus Notes/Domino to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange.

Here are a couple of nuggets from the story.

Republican leaders said they were also concerned about the prospect of missing nuggets of presidential history, but they accused the Democrats of failing to acknowledge the White House's ongoing efforts to retrieve the messages. Republican Ranking Member Tom Davis (R-Va.) said the White House has said it has since reduced the number of days' worth of missing e-mails from 473 to 202 after discovering that those messages had been filed "in the wrong digital drawer" as part of a switch from the Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange e-mail system in 2002.

...

The problems for the Bush administration apparently started soon after the White House decided to shift its e-mail system from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange in 2002. It also replaced the automated records storage system devised by the Clinton administration with a system that one of its own experts described as "primitive," according to Waxman [Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) - *Ed. ].

So, they went from an automated storage system (replication and archiving, anyone?) in Lotus Notes/Domino to some "primitive" system in Outlook/Exchange. My guess? They built their automated records storage system in Notes, because, well, you can and its easy. Then when they switched to Outlook, it wasn't so easy (boy, is that an understatement). So, they went with their "primitive" system, which is described below...

According to the committee, the archive system is an "ad hoc" process called "journaling," in which a White House staffer or contractor manually copies e-mails and saves them on various White House servers. Democrats cast more than a little suspicion on that practice. They cited testimony outside the hearing from a former White House technology worker who said, at least during some points in 2005, those files and directories were available to all 3,000 employees under the umbrella of the executive office of the president.

Dumbasses.

There are similar stories to this where Lotus Notes/Domino saved the day for certain congressmen. I was a judge for Advisor's Excellence Awards a few years ago, and one of the most compelling submissions we had was from the offices of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). During the anthrax scare in the Congressional mailroom a few years ago, all of the servers contained in that mail room - many of them the primary mail/app servers for a number of Congressmen - had to be destroyed, without the ability to gather anything off of them. Sen. Kennedy's office was only down for a matter of minutes - because his office runs on Lotus Notes/Domino, and they simply set up another computer as a server in their office and replicated their dbs back to the server. Viola! - Right back in business, while many of Sen. Kennedy's colleagues (who were on MS Outlook/Exchange) were down for hours, if not days. Sen. Kennedy's office was ecstatic with this power of Notes/Domino, and the Notes Admin was viewed as a hero.

And isn't that what good technology should do? Make heroes out of the IT department?

Too bad Outlook/Exchange couldn't deliver for the Bush White House. I wonder if the White House regrets that migration from Notes/Domino?

Rock